With TikTok’s fate in the balance, Elon Musk (who was briefly linked to a buyout for the embattled app) has floated the return of a once-loved video-sharing platform as a potential replacement.
We’re talking about Vine, a long-shuttered wonderland for memes and viral challenges from which sprung forth a cavalcade of weird and wonderful stars like Logan Paul, Lele Pons and Shawn Mendes.
Vine was like TikTok before TikTok, which itself was originally known as Musical.ly, but we digress.
So, is Mr Musk serious about resurrecting the app? Can he find time to manage it between his roles at Tesla, SpaceX and X/Twitter? And, what exactly is Vine, anyway? Here’s what you need to know.
What is Vine and when did it stop?
In a nutshell, Vine was a mobile-only app owned by Twitter that let you record and share six-second videos that played on a loop.
Users frequently posted pranks, dances, and memes that were re-used and remixed endlessly. The app’s strict six-second limit drew in a savvy, mobile-native crowd, whose quick thinking and sharp editing skills turned brevity into an art form.
Their output was mostly comedic, entertaining and irreverent: a teen playing flutes through his nose, a wholesome clip of rapper Drake and his mum courtside at an NBA game, Squidward hitting a dab on a parade float, and a chorus line of wildly talented dancers.
As such, Vine epitomised the generational divide we often see on social media: younger users flocked to its snappy, creative chaos, while older audiences were left scratching their heads at the slew of in-jokes and GIF-like clips.
But, even if you sat out the circus, you may have experienced Vine secondhand, through endless compilation videos on YouTube, reposts on Twitter, or the occasional clip on Facebook.
An Obama-era relic, Vine shot to 200 million users by 2015, but its mercurial rise came to an abrupt end in 2017 after just four whirlwind years.
The platform died because it couldn’t provide creators with a reliable way to make money from their content. This pushed many of them to migrate to rival platforms like YouTube and Instagram in search of better opportunities.
What has Elon Musk said about Vine?
Mr Musk, who acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it to X, has repeatedly spoken about resurrecting Vine.
In April 2024, he conducted a poll asking X users whether the platform should “bring back Vine”, which received over 450,000 responses, with 69.6 per cent voting in favor of the app’s return.
More recently, in response to an X user’s post suggesting “it’s time to bring back Vine”, Mr Musk said: “We’re looking into it.”
While nothing is official yet, it’s clear to see how Vine could make a reappearance (though its success is another question). Shortly after shutting it down in 2017, Twitter launched Vine Camera, a short-lived app that lets users post looping clips to Twitter or save them to their phones.
Integrating it with X makes sense, especially since the platform already supports livestreaming video and audio. That said, Mr Musk and his team have promised to turn X into a super-app with features like payments, calling, dating, and more – but so far, most of that has not come to fruition.
To make things more complicated, Mr Musk is about to add another job to his plate as President Donald Trump’s head of slashing government spending at the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE).
It may only take a few seconds to watch a Vine, but reviving and restoring it to its former glory could take a whole lot longer. By which point, we’ll probably know whether TikTok is sticking around or going the way of the dodo (or should we say Byte).
